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You might have heard of Slack before. But what is it? Is it email? Is it a chat room? Slack describes their flagship product as a “collaboration hub that can replace email to help you and your team work together seamlessly.” In this... more
You might have heard of Slack before. But what is it? Is it email? Is it a chat room? Slack describes their flagship product as a “collaboration hub that can replace email to help you and your team work together seamlessly.” In this blogpost, we’ll describe how we’ve been using Slack for asynchronous course communication, as opposed to the synchronous course communications afforded by Zoom and other remote conferencing platforms
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Over the past decade, the visualiza.on for cybersecurity (VizSec) research community has adapted many informa1on visualiza1on techniques to support the cri1cal work of cyber analysts. While these efforts have yielded many specialized... more
Over the past decade, the visualiza.on for cybersecurity (VizSec) research community has adapted many informa1on visualiza1on techniques to support the cri1cal work of cyber analysts. While these efforts have yielded many specialized tools and plaJorms, the community lacks a unified approach to the design and implementa1on of these systems. In this work, we provide a retrospec1ve analysis of the past decade of VizSec publica1ons, with an eye toward developing a more cohesive understanding of the emerging paMerns of design: • We iden1fy common thema.c groupings among exis1ng work, as well as interes1ng paMerns of design around the u1liza1on of various visual encodings. • We also discuss exis.ng gaps in the adapta1on of visualiza1on techniques for cybersecurity applica1ons, and recommend avenues for future explora1on. Iden.fying Meaningful Topics through Clustering Performing k-means clustering on the extracted text, we observe 4 clear thema1c groups (Fig. 1): • In the blue cluster (8...
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Visualization research has made significant progress in demonstrating the value of graphical data representation. Even still, the value added by static visualization is disputed in some areas. When presenting Bayesian reasoning... more
Visualization research has made significant progress in demonstrating the value of graphical data representation. Even still, the value added by static visualization is disputed in some areas. When presenting Bayesian reasoning information, for example, some studies suggest that combining text and visualizations could have an interactive effect. In this paper, we use eye tracking to compare how people extract information from text and visualization. Using a Bayesian reasoning problem as a test bed, we provide evidence that a visualization makes it easier to identify critical information, but that once identified as critical, information is more easily extracted from text. These tendencies persist even when text and visualization are presented together, indicating that users do not integrate information well across the two representation types. We discuss these findings and argue that effective representations should consider the ease of both information identification and extraction...
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The VAST Challenge 2017 offered three mini-challenges and a grand challenge dealing with environmental problems potentially caused by human patterns of life and potentially harmful chemically laden effluent plumes being emitted from... more
The VAST Challenge 2017 offered three mini-challenges and a grand challenge dealing with environmental problems potentially caused by human patterns of life and potentially harmful chemically laden effluent plumes being emitted from factory smokestacks. The data provided included traffic patterns, sensor data though a Preserve, information about the Preserve, multispectral imagery and a map to help an ornithology graduate student particularly concerned with the population decrease of the Rose-Crested Blue Pipit determine who and what might be responsible. Mini-Challenge 1 focused on analysis of vehicles passing through the Preserve over time. Mini-Challenge 2 looked at data collected by air sampling monitors surrounding nearby factories, along with meteorological readings, to understand potential impacts they may be having on the Pipit. Mini-Challenge 3 required investigation into several months of multi-spectral imagery over the area to understand the Preserve’s general health. The...
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A large amount of HCI research leverages studies from psychology to try to understand how humans work. Unfortunately, there is often a disconnect between the tightlycontrolled laboratory studies being referenced and the application of... more
A large amount of HCI research leverages studies from psychology to try to understand how humans work. Unfortunately, there is often a disconnect between the tightlycontrolled laboratory studies being referenced and the application of this knowledge in practice. At the same time, many mental health practitioners are beginning to turn toward computational tools to help stretch limited resources and support equitable access to mental healthcare. These efforts could be dramatically enhanced by leveraging what the HCI community has learned about promoting active engagement and designing unobtrusive interfaces. By facilitating collaboration between HCI researchers and practitioners in the field of human services, we are working to understand how our historically separate disciplines might better be able to support one another and together reimagine what constitutes a therapeutic intervention in the 21st century.
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2 Acknowledgements The authors would like to express their gratitude to the following people for their hard work in piloting this curriculum and for their valuable feedback: Thanks also to the teachers and children at the three schools... more
2 Acknowledgements The authors would like to express their gratitude to the following people for their hard work in piloting this curriculum and for their valuable feedback: Thanks also to the teachers and children at the three schools and three summer camps that piloted this curriculum.
The Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge is a yearly competition designed to push forward visual analytics research through synthetic, yet realistic analytic tasks. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and the... more
The Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge is a yearly competition designed to push forward visual analytics research through synthetic, yet realistic analytic tasks. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and the successes we have experienced incorporating the VAST Challenge and associated datasets into undergraduate research programs at two liberal arts colleges. We advocate for increased undergraduate participation in this and similar competitions, arguing they afford unique opportunities for positive development in early researchers.
Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) was the primary language spoken in the late ancient Middle East between the second and eighth centuries AD, and continues to be a language of Christian scholarship and liturgy up to the present day. There are... more
Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) was the primary language spoken in the late ancient Middle East between the second and eighth centuries AD, and continues to be a language of Christian scholarship and liturgy up to the present day. There are approximately 20,000 known surviving Syriac manuscripts. Among early manuscripts, only around 10% include a scribal note that provides information regarding when, where, and by whom a given manuscript was written. For the remaining 90%, close examination of subtle differences in the handwritten script remains the primary tool for determining provenance. Prior to this study, scholars classified early Syriac manuscripts into two divergent script styles: Estrangela and Serto. In this paper, we present a case study of historians’ analysis of this collection of manuscripts supported by visual analytic tools. This approach uncovered major inaccuracies in this dichotomous model, resulting in profound disruption to the dominant understanding of the develop...
Scholars have traditionally categorised early Syriac manuscripts as either Estrangela or Serto. The same categories dominate the prevailing narrative of how Syriac script is thought to have developed. Most see Estrangela as the earliest... more
Scholars have traditionally categorised early Syriac manuscripts as either Estrangela or Serto. The same categories dominate the prevailing narrative of how Syriac script is thought to have developed. Most see Estrangela as the earliest strata of Syriac and Serto as a later development. More recent scholarship explores how early manuscripts support neither this stark division between script styles nor a sequential development. Of particular challenge to this paradigm are a series of securely dated colophons and notes which use a script style different than the main part of the text. But previous work has looked at only five examples of this phenomenon. By expanding this investigation to 30 examples and drawing upon a recent compiled digital corpus of over 100,000 early Syriac letter forms, the present article explores how large data sets, digital analysis, and visual analytics can help one better understand the development of Aramaic scripts.
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Visual analytic systems have long relied on user studies and standard datasets to demonstrate advances to the state of the art, as well as to illustrate the efficiency of solutions to domain-specific challenges. This approach has enabled... more
Visual analytic systems have long relied on user studies and standard datasets to demonstrate advances to the state of the art, as well as to illustrate the efficiency of solutions to domain-specific challenges. This approach has enabled some important comparisons between systems, but unfortunately the narrow scope required to facilitate these comparisons has prevented many of these lessons from being generalized to new areas. At the same time, advanced visual analytic systems have made increasing use of human-machine collaboration to solve problems not tractable by machine computation alone. To continue to make progress in modeling user tasks in these hybrid visual analytic systems, we must strive to gain insight into what makes certain tasks more complex than others. This will require the development of mechanisms for describing the balance to be struck between machine and human strengths with respect to analytical tasks and workload. In this paper, we argue for the necessity of theoretical tools for reasoning about such balance in visual analytic systems and demonstrate the utility of the Human Oracle Model for this purpose in the context of sensemaking in visual analytics. Additionally, we make use of the Human Oracle Model to guide the development of a new system through a case study in the domain of cybersecurity.
Researchers in human–computer interaction and visualization have recently been challenged to develop a better understanding of users’ underlying cognitive processes in order to improve system design and evaluation. While existing studies... more
Researchers in human–computer interaction and visualization have recently been challenged to develop a better understanding of users’ underlying cognitive processes in order to improve system design and evaluation. While existing studies lay a critical foundation for understanding the role of cognitive processes and individual differences in visualization, concretizing the intuition that each user experiences a visual interface through an individual cognitive lens is only half the battle. In this article, we investigate the impact of manipulating users’ personality on observed behavior when using a visualization. In a targeted study, we demonstrate that personality priming can result in changes in behavior when interacting with visualizations. We then discuss how this and similar techniques could be used to control for personality effects when designing and evaluating visualizations systems.
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Research Interests: Graph Theory, Agent Based Simulation, Politics, Visual Analytics, Modeling and Simulation, and 14 moreBehavioral Science, Data Visualization, Data Visualisation, Real Time Systems, Algorithm Design, Political Power, Electronic mail, Interaction Analysis, Data Model, Analytical Model, Discrete Event Simulation, Large Scale, Social Science, and present day
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Data Analysis, Political Science, Agent Based Simulation, Politics, and 15 moreVisual Analytics, Modeling and Simulation, Data Visualization, Data Visualisation, Software Agents, Computer Model, Computer Graphic, Data Model, Domain Specificity, Analytical Model, Interpretive Research, Hypothesis Generation, Agent Based Model, Image Color Analysis, and Interactive Data Exploration
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... Prof. Marina U. Bers, Louise Flannery, Elizabeth Kazakoff, and R. Jordan Crouser DevTech Research Group ... Jared Matas & Miriam Newman, Jewish Community Day School of Boston Ken Lee and Alyssa Ettinger, Tufts University... more
... Prof. Marina U. Bers, Louise Flannery, Elizabeth Kazakoff, and R. Jordan Crouser DevTech Research Group ... Jared Matas & Miriam Newman, Jewish Community Day School of Boston Ken Lee and Alyssa Ettinger, Tufts University Rachael Fein, Tufts University ...
A large amount of HCI research leverages studies from psychology to try to understand how humans work. Unfortunately , there is often a disconnect between the tightly-controlled laboratory studies being referenced and the application of... more
A large amount of HCI research leverages studies from psychology to try to understand how humans work. Unfortunately , there is often a disconnect between the tightly-controlled laboratory studies being referenced and the application of this knowledge in practice. At the same time, many mental health practitioners are beginning to turn toward computational tools to help stretch limited resources and support equitable access to mental healthcare. These efforts could be dramatically enhanced by leveraging what the HCI community has learned about promoting active engagement and designing unobtrusive interfaces. By facilitating collaboration between HCI researchers and practitioners in the field of human services, we are working to understand how our historically separate disciplines might better be able to support one another and together reimagine what constitutes a therapeutic intervention in the 21st century.